What is Debt Doing to Students?

Dissent magazine has a good article in its Summer issue about the effects of the ever-increasing importance of student loans. Basically, the writer maintains that acquiring huge amounts of debt in pursuit of education is affecting the way students view higher education, job choices and even themselves and the rest of the world. It's not, according to the writer a good change.

As someone who incurred more than $10,000 of debt just to return to school for a year so I could finish up my bachelor's degree, I can't necessarily say it changed how I view education itself or the world, but it did change how I view institutions of higher education. Basically, I now see them as being like any other big business. Out to take advantage of peoples' needs and any desire they can manufacture in their "customers." Which is a pretty sad and extreme change from the traditional view.

Where students once were taught that colleges and universities were "ivory towers" where they could explore freely in a supportive environment, today they learn that there's no safe and secure retreat where they can learn and grow independent of the financial pressures of the "real world." Students quickly come to understand that colleges and universities (in concert with banks and lending companies) are predatory. They adjust to this understanding by elevating money to the highest and often only value they place on their education. Low-paying fields are viewed with disdain, often even by the people majoring in them, many of whom pepper their conversations about school with fatalistic predictions that they will never pay off their loans, or be out of debt, on the money they can expect to earn. Students are savvy. Its an act of will to choose literature, or art or even teaching as a career in the face of the prospect of tens of thousands of dollars of debt hanging over you before you even enter the workforce.

Basically, even before they attend their first class, students learn that the only value knowledge has is contained in how much money it can earn you once you leave college. Learning for the sake of improving yourself and preparing to improve your communities, nation and world, is a quaint and outdated ideal when even the people entering high paying fields will spend years paying off their student debts.

And for anyone who thinks this is natural and that students will accept it as such, I can only say that the bitterness I've heard recent graduates express makes a fool of you. Perhaps the most distressing part of the whole student debt issue is we are taking our best, brightest and most idealistic young adults and forcing them into cynicism and self-defeating materialism before they even have a chance to begin to apply the knowledge and skills they pay so dearly to acquire.

Of course, student debt is simply another example of the ever-increasing commoditization of everything here in the U.S. Our religion has become business. Our government has become business. Our charity has become business. Is it any wonder our education has become business, too?